With all the research being done around marketing online and how people use the web, it’s come to light that people just don’t trust corporations as much as they used to, especially not with the way that most companies have managed to smear themselves and sacrifice credibility for a quick buck. So who do they trust?

Well, honestly – people like me.

It’s not the hair, although I have to admit that my machismo gets the best of me sometimes. No, it’s the authority that comes from blogging.

Some have said that within the realm of social media, people don’t generally trust bloggers, however research into that area has shown otherwise. I don’t particularly go for the assertion that bloggers have no authority. I agree that the category of “bloggers” as a whole isn’t necessarily trusted but there are plenty of people who come to specifically trust and form relationships with bloggers and their blogs.

eMarketer did a recent study that clearly demonstrated what I’m talking about. Their study “what makes social media trustworthy” looked into which sources of information are most and least trusted by the average user:

Consider the percentages in this image. 30% or less actually trust brands, products and companies based on participation within Twitter and other communities and less than 40% trust brands on Facebook. Remarkable, over 60% trust blog posts from an individual that they know or have come to know through blogging.

What does this mean for someone who is involved in marketing? It means you and your company need to step out from behind the corporate logo, stop drawing lines in the sand and establish a real presence through blogging. Whether you do it on your own, outsource it, or let your employees develop a voice through blogs you need to do something.

It need to be apparent to customers that there are real people within a company that have real opinions that aren’t being glazed over or astro-turfed. You should be willing to let the employees that work for you represent your brand in a productive, authentic way that matters to the people you’re targeting.

Honestly, it’s more about what you do and what you say than where you’re participating. It doesn’t matter where you hold the conference, as long as what you’re saying to the people that are gathering provides value – the type of value they’re looking for.

People want the opportunity for a two way dialogue, they have very little interest in being talked “at”. One-way messages from any brand have far less impact than an engaging situation where the individual has a chance to actually be heard in the middle of a conversation. They don’t just want a place to vent, that’s only a small portion of the population that can’t control their tongue.

This is how real people speak – in dialogue. Blogging allows just that, and here is proof that it’s effective.

Thanks for your thoughts on Twitter. I am interested in where you think those who have found Twitter useful in the past might migrate to. Forums and blogs are invaluable sources of interacting with like minded marketers, but where do you think things are trending, if ultimately away from Twitter?

Which is a great question.  Let me recap just a little bit.  In the previous article I talked about how Twitter had its uses but in my opinion those are a bit limited.  I think the usefulness of Twitter isn’t to any specific form of contact or method of engagement.  I think it’s very dynamic, as social media tends to be, because we’re dealing with people and growing communities.  That kind of thing is very fluid, without any solid form or color.  That means that like all things, what works for one won’t work for another.  Twitter has a lot of limitations that are being clouded in a lot of hype right now, however it’s still working to some degree for a few primary purposes.

Twitter is a useful tool for listening, as long as you know how to tune out the noise.  Companies like Ford have social media customer service agents that scour the web in places like Twitter and other social media networks looking for dissatisfied customers that they can reach out to.

For anyone who is trying to reach out and touch someone (minds out of the gutter people) then any social network can be effective as long as you’re managing the engagement properly.  The problem with Twitter is that among the select few who are actively hunting for specific people, there are a LOT of people who are running around the party speaking gibberish and just making noise.  It’s a room filled to the brim with talking heads, yes-men and parrots.

Where do I see people migrating to as the novelty wears off?  My initial reaction is to simply spit back “Facebook”, but then they aren’t really moving away from Twitter and moving toward Facebook - most people are already on Facebook.  It’s the social media giant with by the far the largest number of users hands down.  If you combined the user counts of Myspace, Twitter and LinkedIn you still wouldn’t hit the total user count on Facebook.

And that’s assuming you account for all the fake profiles.

I predict that Facebook is going to continue to improve on an already solid network for businesses.  Thus far they’ve done a fairly good job at giving businesses of any size a place to establish a face and personality, with a unique method of engagement that puts a company on the same level as the people.  Through the profile pages of businesses, consumers now have an outlet to like, enjoy and interact with a brand that they support.  Likewise, those who don’t like a particular brand can throw eggs all they like.

Facebook offers far more potential, but that’s not saying that it’s the end all be all of social media marketing either.  For every Goliath, there is a David.  I highly doubt that our David is going to be Twitter.  Google has tried and failed (a few times).  Until one comes along, Facebook will continue to be the go to place.

Every once in a while we get wind of incidents that occur in social media, specifically Twitter, where someone practically swallows their feet immediately after posting. As if their fingers we were working faster than the processing center of their brain – either that or they simply had no real regard for the position of other people and were just talking for the sake of talking.

A few incidents that come to mind might be the Attorney General announcing the execution of an inmate on death row via Twitter.

There’s also the Arizona based video producer that sent multiple Tweets about going on vacation, only to find that his home had been burglarized of his expensive video equipment when he returned home with his family.

Or Al Roker Tweeting and taking pictures of fellow jurors that he posted to his Twitter stream, a violation of the court rules.

Dig a little online and you find this kind of activity all over Twitter. Does the service inspire people to make stupid mistakes? Does it inspire it more than any other social network? Perhaps. The brief space that is given for content to be pushed on Twitter gives you little room to push details. 140 characters really isn’t room for anyone to establish deep context or subtle intent such as the case with the execution of the inmate.

It also gives far too much room for people to make broad sweeping statements that are easily misunderstood and misconstrued. As people fire off little one sentence blurbs, they aren’t often considering exactly what they’re saying. What’s worse, many aren’t thinking about what they’re NOT saying when they aren’t saying anything.

Take that into consideration as you also think about the mass of spam that goes on in Twitter. The auto follows, the auto replies, the retweets just for the sake of a retweet (in hopes of getting a little attention) and what you’ve got is a crowd of people that are all trying to crowd surf at the same time.

That won’t work people, someone has to hold the people up and someone has to surf. Otherwise what you have is a pile of people crawling all over one another and it’s just a writhing tangled mess of bodies. That might have been appealing at one time in ancient Greece but not in social media. Twitter is turning out to be a fairly self-centered medium, and I say that with the understanding that there are still plenty of people both giving and taking. Unfortunately, the majority are only taking and they feel that recycling the same stupid quotes is contributing.

The fact is, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of people listening. Many of the people who are listening tend to be listening for selfish reasons as they look to leverage their own position and network, and those remaining few people that actually provide value are going to realize that there are better channels for networking and socialization – whether for personal or business.

In my opinion, Twitter will remain useful to some extent for a select type of people, but the sweeping popularity and user base is going to implode and decline sharply once the novelty wears off.

You know, someone who speaks at great length about social media, is well known online for their knowledge of it, but doesn’t have much real experience at much of anything save for talking about themselves.

Recently a journalist for CNN sparked a back and forth on the subject, discussing the lack of value in personal brands inside an article featuring Scott Monty of Ford Motor Company.

The journalist portrayed Scott as:

“Someone whose personal brand doesn’t take a back seat to anyone else’s - not even that of Ford Motor Co., his employer”

Of course a slew of people jumped in to defend Scott, and it’s not the first time that debates have erupted over personal branding - where believers take up arms against skeptics who are hurling rocks.  I doubt it’ll be the last time something like this occurs, and it raises an important questions:  Is personal branding legitimate or is it just a method for people to catch their overflowing ego?  Obviously I’ve spent a fair amount of energy and time working on my own personal brand here on this blog while managing my positions in a number of businesses that deal specifically with social media and I’ve had to wrestle with this question myself.  The whole concept can fall into 6 main assumptions between Truth and Fiction:

The Fiction of Personal Branding

Personal branding is about ego, not reputation

Ego is an ugly word and carries with it connotations of arrogance, narcissism and a boat load of pomp.  Guess what?  We all have it.  We all carry an ego to some degree.  It’s likely rather easy to shift into Ego mode if a person doesn’t check their position but personal branding isn’t about ego.  It’s about reputation.  When you develop that reputation, people know who you are when they see you coming.  You just can’t develop a positive personal brand on ego.

Personal brands come at the expense of corporate brands

The previously mentioned article was set to vilify Scott Monty, that by boosting his personal brand he was doing more for himself and less for Ford.  Instead we know when we talk about Scott it’s in our mind that Scott works for Ford.  Through his blog he shows his knowledge and through the success of Ford he proves it.  There’s no separation, and he certainly isn’t using his corporate identity to elevate who he is.  Instead, I believe that Ford is gaining a boost because of what Scott knows.

Only certain people have personal brands

Personal brands are about reputation.  The same goes for corporate brands.  In that regard, we all have a personal brand.  Some are stronger than others but we all have one.  Consider the new reach that digital media has given us and those simple personal brands get even larger.  The web has made it possible for anyone to get their 15 KB of fame, some just understand how to apply their experience and knowledge in order to take it to the next level.

The Truth About Personal Brands

It all starts with me

The funny thing is, a lot of personal brands start from a point of egotism.  A lot of people start in social media by talking about themselves - more from egotistical side.  It’s not that they are arrogant, self-centered or boiling over with arrogance.  They’re just a little naive.  When we first get started with this whole social media engagement thing, it’s just easier to talk about ourselves but we have to remember that like customers who don’t care about products, our followers don’t care about us personally.  Good personal brands break out of this mold and go on to talk about more important things.

Like golf.

Tension will continue

We’ve heard some stories already about individuals that built up a large personal brand and then had some issues maintain a corporate or work position.  There have even been individuals terminated or asked to resign over such positions.  Personal branding isn’t always to blame, I think it’s more likely that these people simply outgrow the positions they have in many of these cases.  Though on the reverse of that, the growth leads to a desire for personal branding which can cause people to want to spread their wings.

Personal branding is important because people are important

Personal branding puts a face to the people that exist within a corporate entity (or any business).  When consumers and clients of a company can see the personality of the people that work within, they can become more attached and comfortable.  That deep emotional connection is comfortable - and achievable.  The concept of the faceless company is going the way of the Dodo.

There’s a number of ways that you can approach a customer on your website and in your content marketing that directly affect the way people perceive your company, products and services.  Despite the fact that many companies have a number of ways to approach consumers, they typically fall into a pattern of selling.

When you write from a sales position, you’re pushing content on the visitor that is completely irrelevant to their current needs.  They are online looking for information relevant to a problem that they’re having.  Through searching for the information, they subconsciously seek for a relationship to be established.  One that will help them see the credibility in a company.

They are looking for content that is engaging, that speaks from a position of relevance.  They desire content that will pull them in not through force, but with permission - where it establishes itself as someone thing they need.  Through that content marketing, the visitor falls under conviction; decide whether or not they need it now and how the opportunity speaks to their unique position.

They want to know that there is value, and they want to know how they will be affected in the long-term by opting in for the product… and by not taking it at all.  Most importantly they want to know that it’s about them.

Unfortunately with many businesses, it’s now about the visitor.  Their content is all about the company, the products and the services.  It’s formulated to focus on transactions - broadcasting a slew of content that pushes interruption in the thoughts of the visitor in an effort to place itself in a position of importance.  Once there, it hammers on things like cost, commodity, utility.

Instead of focusing on the most important aspects that the visitor needs, businesses tend to write copy that does nothing but fire an onslaught at all the available holes in hopes of hitting it’s mark.  The value, if any, is short lived.

One style, the most important, is about the visitor.  The other style, most commonly used, is about you.  Are you offering what you sell (them) or are you selling what you offer (you)?

Look at your content marketing - where do you stand?

Generally speaking, we know that the more links you attract the higher you’ll climb in the SERPs. One of the things that people are doing to push that climb and “Game” the system a little bit, from a good-guy hat perspective, is by utilizing link-bait.

The quality of the content in a variety of categories really draws the attention of people, and with the way the web has changed – making it easier than ever for people to share that content – you’re looking at a greater potential to become king of the rock.

When you get hundreds of unique bloggers and Twitter users sharing your content, you start creating and manipulating a massive backlink profile that you can put you on the top fast.

Of course we talk about link bait like it’s a specific thing, but it’s a bit of an umbrella term for the types of content that make people twitch. What kind of techniques can you use to push link bait efforts?

Lists

People love them, they’re easy to digest, and they often fall into one of two formats: educational or amusing. Either way, they’re perfect for link bait fodder.

Infographics

People enjoy devouring data quickly, and infographics make that wholly possible. When coupled with lists it’s like a double-whammerr.

Be controversial… or dumb

By making a little noise you can get some attention. Heads turn in your direction as word spreads. It’s not the best attention, but it worked for Howard Stern. You can likely make it work for you as well.

Be Contrary

This is different from being controversial or picking fights. This is just about going against the grain. They go one way you go another way. There are a lot of people who enjoy reading and listening to others who go against the grain, whether they agree with them or not.

Provide Tools

People love useful tools, especially when they’re free. It helps if they’re actually useful. Make a list of tools and you’re putting icing on the cake.

Fight With People

Not physically anyway. Nose around for someone you can take a shot at, leverage their content and start picking fights with other bloggers. Use their position to get into an argument with them. You’ll inevitably draw a crowd.

Setup a competition

Old hat, but very effective. Competition can create a massive amount of interest and a lot of links to your site. Whatever you can do to pit users online against one another to compete for the top spot will generate a lot of interest – as long as the prize isn’t lame.

Be Amusing

That’s easier said than done, as some people are terribly dry now matter how hard they work at it – sometimes when they work at it, it gets worse. Regardless, work some comedy into your content and make it fun.

Talk Smack About Apple

I don’t know why this works, but it always does.

Talk Smack About Microsoft

Probably the Apple fans loving you for this one.

Release a Whitepaper

Thought leadership has proven results, and when you release content that has a lot of depth and information within your niche it can catch and be widely circulated – often picking up comments and reviews from bloggers.

Do Something New

In the world of “me too”, this can be a lot harder for some. With the range of people on the net, and everyone striving to be heard (even the little emo-bears on YouTube) it’s more difficult than ever to do something unique.

Let’s face it - writing sucks. No one likes to do sit down and do it all day save for the lovely copywriting geeks (and I say that as a term of endearment - many of us would be lost without good copywriters). With that said, I haven’t met too many people that can sit down and start cramming out quality content.

Most of us stare at the blank screen or white sheet of paper and we’re like “ooooooh crap.“

Sometimes we can put content together that is engaging and entertaining when we are inspired by the right topic but for the most part it’s a big damn crapshoot if you haven’t done the proper research and revision or have the experience to put it all together. Since most of us know that it’s hard to find a good copywriter at an affordable price, you often have to DIY your content marketing.

So that means you’re left with the writers block - and when you’re trying to worry about SEO in your content marketing and a lot of other factors you just gum up the whole process. That leads to burnout. I’m gonna throw out some tips that have helped me avoid nasty cases of the “stupids” while staring at a blinking cursor:

When You’re Feeling Creative - Don’t Waste It

It doesn’t matter if you’re sitting at a relative’s house, out for coffee, lounging at home - if you get a sudden creative spark then you need to do something with it before you lose it. This is your job, it’s your business, and sometimes that means you work in random placed. When the creative juices start flowing after a period of “duh”, then you need to summon your inner Hemingway, Mark Twain, Steve Martin - whatever; just write!

Get your words moving from topic to topic and get your idea solidified in some kind of draft form before it’s lost. It doesn’t matter if your thoughts wander on paper, you can edit it when the time comes. Don’t sit there worrying about things like SEO or word count - get it out of your system. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just need to “be”.

Want to know what the benefit is of a 3,000 word document full of random thoughts? It’s a feeding trough for the next time you need a piece to write on, or some inspiration for another piece of SEO content. If you have pages of random thoughts, you create an SEO treasure chest.

Go Back To School - Remember The Outline

Feel like your brain took a vacation and left you with only the mush-cushion? Is your creative process looking more like a Pinto broke down on the side of the expressway? Stop trying to brainstorm about writing the piece and start developing an outline.

Begin with the primary topic, list what you like about the topic - use that list to generate some titles and sections. From there, decide what points you can discuss that highlight those segments - bullet those items.

What you’ll end up with is a brief outline that should generate sufficient fuel to get your brain-train rolling along again. You have a title already, just write an opening, a segway paragraph and then expand on your bullets.

When Outlines Fail - Play with Headlines

There will be days when you’re trying to expand on your content marketing, and the world is just crushing you with its oppressive weight of “mondayness” throughout the week. Outlines fail, free flow writing sucks, and the last time you checked your creativity was lounging in the pool - beckoning you. When this happens, shoot for headlines.

You might not be able to utilize all the headlines at the moment, but you can add them to your SEO treasure chest and apply them to future content marketing pieces. That brainstorm of headlines will certainly reveal something you can expand upon. Enough headlines could ignite the scram hets and send you careening off in another direction than your initial plan, with smoking hot content that will certainly get some attention.

Just remember to reread the headline once you’re done, and see if it still applies to the article you’ve put together. More often than not you end up rewriting it a bit.

Get Out Of The Norm

If the blinking cursor is killing you, then get up and walk away. Not for a break, but for a different medium. Try scrawling notes on a whiteboard like a crazy scientist. If you a typewriter, sit down in front of it. Or go for the old pen and paper method in a comfortable chair - see what comes out.

The key to dominating the writer’s block that comes from running your own content marketing strategy is to do something. Anything. You don’t have to be a slave to it. If you do nothing, you gain zero traction and your marketing will falter. Do something, and you’ll eventually find light on your path.

There’s still a quiet little war being fought that erupts once in a while and spills out into mainstream. It exists between the old school marketers and the new guys that have come on the scene as advocates of change.

The confrontation always seems to boil down to who owns social media: The Marketing Team or The PR Guru’s?

It’s a common thought that social media should be treated just like any other channel for marketing. It has established rules, a fundamental purpose as well as variable strengths and weaknesses. It’s also good for crafting and shaping opinions, so on the surface it seems like it would predominantly fall in the realm of PR.

To position it in that manner would be a mistake unfortunately. That move would cause it to lose authenticity and create restrictions on messaging. If PR has the rope, then what about others within the organization? What about other promotions and value that can be delivered? It’s not feasible for PR to manage the multitude of voices in an organization.

So that leaves us with Marketing. Social media is a mass of contact points, and each one impacts the organization/brand/individual in a different way. Because this, I fall back on the same reason I say no to PR. The organization is made up of more than just the Marketing group.

Social media does indeed need to be owned by someone, but it should be a team that is specifically designed to represent the various facets of the company and deliver messages that represent the organization as a whole – not just from a marketing and PR perspective.

Often the best teams are made up of people who carry knowledge and understanding of both marketing and PR along with the fundamental understanding of what it means to talk WITH consumers and not AT them. Those organizations that rely heavily on a marketing or PR department will find themselves mired in the traditional corporate speak and ill-delivery of messages that never quite fall on the consumers the right way.

Not to say that all marketing and PR departments get it wrong. Certainly those that have restructured and changed their way of thinking to a more modern position on social media and customer engagement actually get it. They deliver their messages quite well more often than not. It’s those still living under the old rules of marketing and PR that cause businesses to struggle the most.

If any organization wants to remain ahead of the pack with social media marketing, there will need to be a hybrid team – and change is necessary.

By general standards it appears everything was handled properly.  You even did everything the “experts” and agencies told you to.  Keywords, blog posts, videos, direct marketing.  Still, you gain no traction.  You’re not even seeing gravity within your social media marketing where you thought for certain you’d gain steam among your followers.

Here are 10 reasons where you likely went wrong.

1. Your actual message is full of “I” and “me” instead of anything relating to “you” (you know..the customer)

2. You neglected to communicate the “Why” to the people you’re targeting

3. Your copy isn’t at all focused on the “What”

4. Further investigation reveals that there is little to no information on the “How”

5. …or the “What if”  is in.. “what if I buy it” or “what if I don’t”

6. You’re spending a lot of time positioning yourself as a thought leader, droning on about yourexpertise instead of actually defining a clear solution to a problem that the customer is having.

7. You’re basing your marketing off assumptions about your targeted buyers, often because you’ve sold some stuff before and since you’ve been doing it for so long you just know your experience puts you in the right place.  Probably a good idea to replace that attitude with hard fact gathering and listening.

8. You didn’t spend enough time testing your products and services before the launch - or you did no testing at all

9. For you, social media and your email are like a firehose.  Information goes one way and it goes that way fast.  It needs to be two-way to spark conversation.

10. You lack anything that resembles compassion and empathy for your target audience because you’re worried more about making money than solving their problems - and it shows.

You have to find as many ways as possible to narrow your message so that it speaks to each individual within your target audience.  You cannot be all things to all people, and you cannot survive the marketing game if your copy is too impersonal.  Especially not in a world where we’re driven by personal connections in social media.

Business owners breaking into the world of social media marketing and content marketing find a bit of a quandary when they’re trying to build out a strategy. Not only do they have to develop a number of goals but they have to settle on tactics, educate themselves, do research, define the buyer, understand the competition and determine the type of content to develop.

Then there’s that pressing question – how often do they develop the content?

With just a bit of research into content marketing through social media an individual or organization can come to understand the importance of the press release, articles, blogs, etc but you don’t often see information on how often you should send that content out.

A lot of business owners and marketers start worrying about how much is too much – and for that matter how much is too little. When you start thinking about content marketing for SEO purposes, you want to filter out enough content in your campaign to have a significant impact on your rank in the SERPs. You also want to hit that mark without coming off as spammy in any way.

Unfortunately, there really is no “one size fits all” answer to how much you should send out content.

Press releases used to be saved until the company had a pile of useful info and they 1 or several releases would be sent at a time. Now, businesses submit press releases for anything they perceive to be relevant to their target market. Does that means it’s always relevant? Probably not, but since most businesses typically have some kind of information or news to share relevant to their consumers at least 2-4 times a month, you can safely bet that putting out less than 5 press releases per month will gain you some organic listings without the fear of spam – as long as you’re not stuffing keywords into your press releases.

Articles – the red light district of link building. If you’ve got cheap content with no real value I’m going to tell you to stop submitting it and don’t use it at all. Most PLR does nothing but waste space and someone landing in your sales funnel that’s forced to read trash content with no clear, defining message and zero value won’t stay in that sales funnel for long. However, if you can produce quality content for your marketing campaign then pushing 1 or 2 articles a day would be beneficial.

If you do at least 1 article per day, you can gain a lot of ground in the SERPs over the course of your campaign. Is it necessary to do more? Not really, unless you want to run an aggressive campaign. Just be aware that an accumulation of links that occurs too quickly could create issues with the search engine algorithm, even if they’re organic.

Let’s not forget the almighty power of the blog. I’m sure many of us know people who only blog once a week, or even once every other week. Some blog several times a week like I do, and others blog every single day. It’s really a matter of personal preference. The more you post, the more aggressive your content marketing will be and the faster you’ll develop a presence within the web – contributing overall to your link profile and rank within the SERPs among other things.

Regardless of how much you choose to do something, always remember to create a refined strategy with your choices. If you decide to post to your blog 3 times a week then stick to the same days and do it consistently. That same advice goes for articles and press releases. Create a consistent routine.

When you generate a schedule for yourself, it’s harder to walk away from it or set it to the wayside in order to get other things. If you keep putting off your content marketing, the next thing you know two weeks have gone by and you’ve done nothing.

Toy with your schedule enough and you’ll find a strategy that not only works for you but one that produces results as well.

When you define what a pearl is, you have to take into account that there are very real pearls and very fake ones.  The finest quality natural pearls are extremely rare and require deep mining of the ocean to find those that have the most value.  Those with the highest quality are valued for their beauty, and have been so for centuries.  That’s why the word pearl is associated with something that is extremely rare, intrinsically valuable and very fine.

Cultured pearls make up the majority of what is traded in the market but you can still find valuable pearls within the wild ocean.  To supplement the industry and in an effort to turn profit, plenty of imitation pearls also flood the market.  Despite their attempts to replicate beauty, fake pearls are often easy to identify and stand out against the real thing like an ugly stepsister.

Take with that how we view social media, and consider the concept of “pearls of wisdom”.  When we peruse through conversations and  social media marketing attempts we can see that the most valuable conversations do indeed still occur in the expansive ocean of the web - but they’re very rare. It’s these rare conversation that actually grant an intuitive comprehension of solutions along with the ability to apply the necessary process to meet that solution.

Conversations that fall into the realm of “fake pearls of wisdom” are a bit easier to spot and can be quickly distinguished from the rest.  We see those more often with content marketing throughout social media that is hammered and spammed with poor quality PLR and recycled mish-mash

With social media marketing, business sometimes neglect the true transparency of their presence and conversations.  Without any clear understanding of what quality is, they move forward using old marketing tactics and gimmicks to create a social media stir.  The result is that people quickly pick them apart from the bunch as being “fake”.  What’s worse is the group that take an advertorial standpoint with social media and start pushing messages to their followers that add absolutely zero value to the fold.  The content does not lend itself to a solution, and lacks any real “wisdom”.

People migrate to, thrive on and demand true pearls.  At the same time, there’s a certain expectation that they are indeed hard to find.  That’s one of the reasons why those conversations provide so much value, because of their rarity.  The only way to make a bee line and connect with the user who is seeking your pearls of wisdom, and effectively drive the right message, is to view social media in the proper light.  You must be marketing on a human network where you can be caught seeking wisdom (both receiving and delivering).  If you’re anything but, such as striving for an integrated network of leads as you power efforts to gain attention and ad click, then people with disperse and gather elsewhere.

Social media marketing is a monstrous construct, like the witches golem.  Among the folds and debris that are constantly added to, you can find the pearls of wisdom that come from a very select and small crowd of people.  They provide information and authority that can last forever.

The rest?  Well, all those other forced results are temporary.

It’s amazing how advancements in technology can bring us back still in a full circle to remember out origins. Now, someone has taken the age old concept of bartering for goods and services and combined it with social media marketing.

The Tweet now has new value.

The concept, “Pay with a Tweet”, was cofounded by two men, Leif Abraham and Christian Behrendt who believe “In general, all content creators and marketers want to create buzz for themselves, their brand, product or service. [Pay with a Tweet] is perfect to create a quick buzz around you, your service and your products.”

Launched earlier this month, the Pay with a Tweet system allows consumers to pay for items such a retail stock or downloadable goods (music, downloaded paper) by exchanging the item for a Twitter message. The whole concept uses the power of the word of mouth marketing in order to generate buzz for a specific item or business in order to promote the brand. It’s actually quite brilliant in a way, because they’re leveraging something that already exists by using something that people are already doing.

The co-founders foresee a platform where business owners can sell and market their products to consumers around the world that are willing to Tweet about the products. Retailers and site owners can have a button embedded within their site or cart system that gives the message to consumers on what to tweet with an embedded non-editable link. Their exact brand message then goes out over the Twitter network. Users can still add their own additional comments to the message being sent.

While it’s a new system, it seems to have a fair amount of potential. I’m sure there will be plenty of people murmuring about the effectiveness of bribing people for Tweets but as content marketers, what else are we doing if not bribing people with words and information?

Is there any difference between a beneficial piece of content and a free razor? What do you think?

It’s not like Geico.

Granted I’m not talking about the physiology of the human body.  We’re not talking about acid-base as it related to pH balance.  We’re not mixing rocket fuel.  This is easy stuff.  You can get by posting to your Facebook profile without a psych major.  You can probably write a 550 word blog post rant about people who cut across the Walmart parking lot doing 40mph instead of using the lanes (I loathe that…) and manage it without a literature degree.

You obviously don’t need a production team to post a video of a customer who won’t stop bragging about you.

There’s that remote possibility that you’re the type of person who stares at a blank sheet of paper or the blinking cursor and wonders if you may be more productive had you not done…all those things in high school you did.  Maybe you just hate writing, or perhaps there’s a part of you that thinks dancing in front of a camera for YouTube sounds like something you just.. can’t bring yourself to do.

Maybe both.

The fact is, social media is about engagement and content, and because content drives the web you’re pretty much forced to do one or the other.  Granted theirs audio, but you can’t really run an “audio” campaign.  You’ve got to supplement it with more.  From a business standpoint, social media seems like the insurmountable barrier for a lot of business owners who have this mindset.

Personally, I think that sucks.  And I say that coming from a position of total empathy.

The fact is, there are a lot of business owners that are concerned about the amount of time they can put into social media and whether or not they’re even capable of doing it themselves.  Keep in mind my self-employed friends, you do have the opportunity to have someone else handle and maintain your web presence.

So what are you overall options as a business owner?

You - Yeah we pretty much ruled that out.  That one is skunked.  It’s the logical choice but there is obviously something holding you back whether it’s skill, time, fear, stubbornness, etc.  So lets just move right along.

An Employee -  The next logical choice but you have to consider a few things.  The time you need to allot for that employee to manage the web presence.  Do they have the knowledge of social media?  Are they skilled and talented enough to create the content you need?  Can they act in an unbiased manner instead of lashing out irrationally with responses like “I dO nOt hAvE A ComFortaBle LiFe!” on your Facebook wall?  Some companies have employees that make the cut, many simply don’t.

Random Family - As good as their intentions usually are, we all know from many years of broken deals, heartache and horse-trading that getting family involved in business just… well I’ll just say that the drawbacks are not only numerous, but painful to think about.  The end result is usually bad.  Not like “oooooh no I got a flat tire” bad.  More like “four horsemen of the apocalypse” bad.

Professional Agency/Freelance/Outside Contractor - If you’ve got the budget for this, it’s a great option.  There are a lot of companies that will completely monitor your reputation online.  They’ll handle all of your social media accounts, write content and market with that content, etc.  Budget for businesses is usually the issue but the return with social media marketing is often much higher over time than what gets invested.

Ultimately, you have to make a smart decision about what you’re going to do.  It may seem OK to just put a warm body in the seat but as we know from running a business for years, you can’t just hire anyone.

I admit it can be a bit of a catch22.  What do you think?  If you’re stuck between worry and budget, what’s the best choice if there’s legitimate concern on both sides?

To every small business owner, I’d like to check your pulse. I want to know if you’re still in the game, if there’s still life left in you.

Mainly because I’m concerned with the way marketing is changing. What once was, is no more and cannot be handled as such.

I regularly have discussions with small business owners because it’s a market I consider to be my playground. It’s my territory, and working with small business owners is where I thrive. I commonly run into businesses that have little to no presence on the web with no plans to change that. Often, one of the first questions I ask is why the business had adopted the strategy that they use. I often get a number of things noted to me in return that play a part in their online presence (or lack thereof):

1. Their demographic doesn’t involve young kids and teenagers or stay-at-home parents who putz around on Facebook. They want people who have additional income to spend, and in their eyes those people don’t spend their day lounging online

2. They have success with their direct mail campaigns (flyers, magnets, post cards, letters) that they typically design themselves. I marvel at the instability of the business and wonder what their definition of “success” is. Mine seems to be quite different

3. They often have a website that was designed by a friend, family member, by themselves or it was designed by a local “designer” with an at home “web design” business. The sites tend to leave a lot to be desired, aren’t optimized in any form and more often than not I’m told that they don’t change or update it because they either can’t afford to do so or they don’t want to hurt the feelings of the person who designed it.

4. For those that performed some measure of research and contacted companies for marketing, they were frustrated that they could not receive quantifiable returns on the investment. They want to be told that business will increase by X amount of dollars over a specific period and it’s something that couldn’t be substantiated. Because of that, they backed out.

5. They just don’t understand “it”. Because they don’t understand social media marketing and location based marketing online so they simply do not participate or attempt to do so. It’s not for them.

Without being crass or lacking in compassion, I have to be blunt. These business owners are likely going to sink and go out of business. Cash flow will continue to be choked off by the raging social media marketing campaigns of competitors and the customer base will continue to shrink each day.

To answer the shrinkage and forced price reductions to get people in the door they turn to the same methods – direct mail, bigger yellow page ads, radio spots. They’re attempting to run their business in the new millennium, in 2010, like it’s still 1983.

This is where my compassion presses me forward because situations like this frustrate me. It is the actions of the business owner that brought them to this point. Their lack of social media marketing and online presence is causing them to lose their customer base. It has less to do with the economy than many people think.

The world of online marketing is a new and mystifying place to someone who doesn’t understand the nature of the creature but business owners have to stop turning a blind eye to the things they don’t understand. They should instead be seen as opportunities to break ground and put a positive change into affect. For those companies willing to surge forward and discover how social media marketing can aid their business, they gain traction from competition that is paralyzed with the fear of the unknown. Because of the lack of action among their competitors, they’re able to dominate the market share and have growth even in a stale economy.

Where do you see yourself and your small business in 2010? Where do you want to see yourself by 2011?

Are you still hanging on?

It’s a concept that has become ever popular as social media has grown and expanded around the world.  There was a time where to become an influencer it meant direct and constant involvement, building, managing and a lot of time spent “positioning”.  Those people who were influencers had profound impacts on their market and their position was rarely contested (save for those of opposing markets)

Now we’ve moved (and continue to press into) an age of complete transparency and openness.  Between free publishing tools and “like” buttons, the concept of the influencer may be losing it’s value or credibility.

When we participate in a world laden with cheap like buttons and the ease of obtaining a click or sharing information, how much value can be placed on someone or something just because a throng of people gave a vote of confidence or thumbs up?  What defined an influencer then is certainly different from what defines one now.

At least I hope so - I pray that it will be about more than just click-through’s.

I’m left wondering how influence stands in the world we’re in now.  If person A can get person B to click on a link, does that mean that person A has influence?  If so, to what scale?  I’m of the mind that I think it’s important to consider a certain point;  Just because someone has the ability to influence or manipulate a given situation to obtain a desired outcome it doesn’t necessarily mean that person is influential or that they carry influence on a grander scale.

Once upon a time, before AOL sucked the world into it’s addictive black hole, actually moving a person into action was likely something that could grant someone the position of being influential.  Now, in a world where anyone can get anyone else to perform an action through retweets, likes, updates, SMS and more then I’m left to wonder what kind of metrics to look for that prove real influence.  Perhaps it’s not in how many clicks you can gather but if you can create something that disseminates beyond that first group. If you can engage your immediate network to begin reaching out into more distant degrees of separate to spread the message and pass the influence along - getting others beyond them to take action.

It’s possible that we’ve stepped through a point of evolution, into a new age, where there is no longer one great channel to cross in order to reach our goal and destination.  We may not be able to focus on a single tipping point much longer but instead our influence may have to be measured in the overall reach.

In a world where everyone seems capable of having influence, it’s more like an intricate network of dominoes.  Set em up - and if you set things up properly you can watch the dominoes continue to fall, reaching out to touch the next in line, passing the momentum forward.